These days, IT companies need to build their public brand in ways that aren’t always obvious. Many do it through social initiatives — planting trees, helping animals — and that’s genuinely important. For us, an engineering company, the most natural way to contribute has always been simple: write great code and share it with the community. As Linus Torvalds famously said, “Talk is cheap. Show me the code.”
That’s what we do at Postgres Professional: ship code, open it to the world, invest in people, and lead by example. And that’s why we’ve opened a new office in Novosibirsk Akademgorodok. Why there, what we’re chasing, and how tomorrow’s tech ties in — that’s the story of the next few pages.
Open source as a mindset, not a marketing slogan
Let’s be honest: saying “We contribute to open source” has become the hygiene minimum for any mature tech company. Press releases, conference talks, podcast interviews — you’ll find variations of that phrase everywhere. And that’s not bad. It simply means open source has grown up.
Today, most major contributions to serious open‑source projects come from full‑time engineers whose regular job is to improve these systems. The romantic era of sleepless nights, energy drinks, and heroic bursts of coding has given way to predictable, professional development.
But there’s another side: for many companies, open source still ends with a shiny announcement. A prototype repo goes public, the license restricts modification, PRs sit unreviewed for months — and that’s it. Checkbox ticked.
At Postgres Pro, our goal from day one has been different: not just use PostgreSQL, but develop it. Not building wrappers, plugins, or middleware — but working on the actual PostgreSQL core.
If you want proof, you can simply look at the commit history. For PostgreSQL 18 alone, more than 40 of our engineers contributed patches. Many of the most interesting ones we write about regularly in our Habr blog.
Yes, we also maintain our own commercial fork — and some of its features will never be upstreamed. But that’s the point: upstream is for universally relevant improvements, not for region‑specific compliance or narrowly specialized integrations.
That’s why we say we hire not just database developers, but true systems engineers — the kind who shape the very foundation of the global software ecosystem. They improve the planner algorithms, refine the optimizer, enhance storage subsystems, and polish replication methods — the parts most developers treat as a black box.
Your average application engineer doesn’t need to understand every layer of PostgreSQL internals just to build a pet project. But someone needs to build and maintain those internals — and that’s what we do.
Why Akademgorodok was the natural choice
Choosing Akademgorodok for our new office wasn’t about cost optimization. If you’ve ever been there, the reason is obvious: the area breathes science. Dozens of research institutes, a major university (NSU), experimental labs, scientific teams, and generations of researchers — all in one compact, interconnected ecosystem.
The atmosphere is radically different from office‑dense megacities. Students, engineers, scientists, and PhDs live and work side‑by‑side, constantly exchanging ideas. Fundamental research isn’t a niche here — it’s part of the local culture.
For Postgres Pro, a company rooted in low‑level engineering, this environment feels natural. But a unique place is ultimately defined by people. Our main goal in Akademgorodok is simple: invest in the next generation of systems programmers, testers, architects, and researchers — especially the ones who love deep tech problems.
We’re building not just an office, but a true engineering center — a place where experienced PostgreSQL contributors mentor students, explore new ideas, and work on system‑level components without needing to explain why knowing how WAL works actually matters.
Developing, experimenting, upstreaming
Our work here will focus on:
advancing system‑level PostgreSQL components,
researching performance and scalability models,
experimenting with new approaches,
most importantly — trying to upstream improvements.
Upstreaming isn’t instant gratification. Every patch must earn its place through review, debate, and proof that it solves a real, shared problem. Some patches take years to merge. But that’s what keeps PostgreSQL reliable.
And only after that comes the part everyone sees: millions of developers using the product worldwide.
Investing in people, not just code
We learned long ago that systems programming can thrive only when young engineers stay curious about it. It’s a narrow field, and without a steady stream of newcomers, the entire area stagnates.
This is why we’ve spent years building educational programs — almost all of them free and open to anyone:
Postgres Pro Summer School: real system‑level tasks under the guidance of our engineers.
A joint research lab with NSU: where students work on thesis‑level projects.
Extensive documentation for current PostgreSQL versions.
Open programming olympiads for school students.
Widely known books like PostgreSQL Internals and The SQL Language Basics.
Full online courses ranging from beginner SQL to advanced development topics.
A complete university support program: materials, licenses, and an annual PGConf Academy event.
All of this can be done online — and we’ve done so for years. But having an office in Akademgorodok adds something special. Students from NSU, SibSUTI, and NSTU can walk in, open a laptop, and talk through their ideas with real contributors instead of a screen.
Theory, practice, and back to theory
Systems programming sits at the crossroads of science and engineering. To contribute to a database engine, you need to understand OS internals, data consistency models, memory and CPU behavior, and the math behind query planning.
No university curriculum has enough hours to cover all of that in depth. What students really need is real practice and access to people who write this code every week.
This is why we believe companies that care about fundamental technology should go beyond capital‑city office logic and settle in places like Akademgorodok — where ideas are part of the air.
Here, students can see how architectural decisions are debated, how patches are prepared for upstream, how reviews work, and how large systems evolve.
Why this matters for the entire industry
Everyone agrees that developing local expertise and strong engineering talent is important. But here’s the part often left unsaid: without a strong school of systems programming, it’s all just pretty words.
We don’t want to build alternatives for the sake of alternatives. We want to create world‑class technology — relevant globally, built on open‑source principles, and backed by real contributions.
PostgreSQL is the most popular database in the world today. And engineers from our region have played a huge role in its development. Yet for many young developers, the PostgreSQL core still looks like an incomprehensible ancient script.
We want to change that. Complex doesn’t mean inaccessible. It simply means you need the right mentors. Our new office is a hub where knowledge meets curiosity — and Akademgorodok is the ideal place to nurture that connection.
Less talk, more commits
In an industry where slides often matter more than substance, we try to stay true to the old principle: your code speaks for you.
That’s why we didn’t open “just another office”. We made a step toward the future of PostgreSQL — and toward the people who will build it.